


Crossing the Endless Desert

by spuffyduds



Category: Prometheus (2012)
Genre: Blanket Permission, Dark, Other, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-11
Updated: 2012-06-11
Packaged: 2017-11-07 11:54:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/430881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spuffyduds/pseuds/spuffyduds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not a happy journey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crossing the Endless Desert

**Author's Note:**

> Contains hatesex of sorts, and is really rather unpleasant.

It takes her a few days to come to her senses. For her to fully emerge from the massive dose of painkillers she gave herself just so she could keep going. For the grief and shock and horror to wear off just enough that she looks down at her hands and really _sees_ them. Her hands that are following his every instruction, every reattachment step he’s reciting to her in his mild lulling voice, like a bedtime story. 

She gasps and starts ripping wires apart again, as fast as she can, because Jesus, what was she _doing_ putting him back together?

He tries to talk her into changing her mind, of course. 

“You’d kill me,” she says. “I have to sleep and you don’t, and if you’re back together you don’t need me alive, you’d kill me and head back for Earth.”

“Earth was only a suggestion,” he says, so calmly. “I have no particular strong desires as to our destination.”

“And I have no reason to believe you. You just _tell_ me how to pilot this.”

“I really would prefer to be fully functional.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you prefer. I don’t need anything working except your mouth.”

He makes some sort of rueful face that probably would have gone along with a shrug if he’d still had shoulders.

“The nutrient packs on this ship were obviously not optimized for _human_ health,” he says. “Eventually you’ll become ill, and I’ll need to put you in stasis and pilot the ship myself, and I can’t do that without a body, Elizabeth.”

“We’ll worry about that when it happens,” she says, and hates that she said “we.”

He’s quiet for a long while, but the next time she tries to sleep--turns his face toward the wall and strips down to her undershirt--he starts talking again; not conversation but a droning recitation of random chemical properties.

“Shut _up_ ,” she says.

“Put me back together.”

She picks his head up by the hair, carries him to a far-off room and tosses him in, walks back to hers. But then she still can’t sleep, lies staring up at the grey ceiling. Because now she’s really alone, alone in the huge ship, in the black of space. 

She walks back to the room where she left him. It. It’s moved on now, reciting something about the desert. Sometimes it makes shooting noises.

She sits and watches it, its mouth moving. After a long while, it stops, says, “I can talk forever, you know. And you can’t be alone, can you? You’ll go mad from the lack of sleep, eventually. Put me back together.”

“No,” she says. And it starts talking again, but this time it’s reciting her dreams.

She just listens for a while, feeling nothing. Then it starts one about her father, one of the worst ones about her father, one of the true ones. And she has to shut it up, has to make it stop, he has to stop talking.

She grabs his hair again, shoves his head between her thighs, holds him hard against her until she can’t tell what his words are anymore. Just sounds, just his tongue and lips working against her, and she curls around him, makes herself as small as she can like a little child and presses his face into her, wishes he needed to breathe, wishes she could kill him like this.

She’s crying, making loud wet noises that echo through the empty ship and the empty sky, and she’s coming. And there’s no one here but her and it, no one in the whole black sky but her and him forever and ever, and probably one day, probably soon, she’ll put him back together.

\---end---


End file.
